Air Guitar: Get rocked in 60 seconds

Wednesday

May 28, 2008 at 12:01 AMMay 28, 2008 at 2:57 AM

The road to the 2008 Air Guitar World Championships in Finland will start with regional competitions in more than 20 cities around the country, including one on June 5 at the Middle East Club in Cambridge.

Francis Ma

Air guitar — it’s not just for the privacy of your bedroom or drunken performances in bars anymore.

Today, it’s a calling for those brave few who have the ability to get a rock crowd excited about the illusion of a rock star.

It’s also a competition. The road to the 2008 Air Guitar World Championships in Finland will start with regional competitions in more than 20 cities around the country, including one on June 5 at the Middle East Club in Cambridge. (Yes, Pete Townshend of the shower, there’s still time for you to sign-up.)

But potential competitors should know that getting to the World Championships is about more than the music. It’s about the things people love about rock: the epic stances, facial expressions of the possessed, and the chance to turn on a crowd in 60 seconds with nothing but an invisible guitar and visible attitude.

And it’s about respect. Since the United States won the 2004 Championship thanks to David “C-Diddy” Jung’s performance of Extreme’s “Play with Me,” the country has been shut out. And that’s an embarrassment in the Land of Elvis.

“I think we’re still waiting for the next C-Diddy to show up,” explains Cedric Devitt, co-founder and commissionaire of US Air Guitar. “That hasn’t happened yet and we’re still kind of reeling from that.”

The idea of air guitar championships was seen as a novelty until about 2003, when the media grabbed hold of the phenomenon and ran with it (the story even made MSNBC’s “Countdown” with Keith Olbermann, who displayed his own chops at the end of his broadcast).

The highpoint of the artform was the documentary “Air Guitar Nation,” a 2006 release that catapulted C-Diddy into popular culture.

But for the past five years, the U.S. has offered up no air Eddie Van Halens (the U.S. shared the title with New Zealand in the still-debated debacle of 2004), and the competition has evolved from an offbeat story about the would-be rock star in us all to serious competitors intent in bringing the air trophy back to the United States.

C-Diddy has since retired and while other competitors like William Ocean or Craig “Hot Lixx Hulahan” Billmeier have exemplified technical prowess, they seem to be missing the ever-elusive quality of “airness.”

“What is airness?” replies Devitt. “The easiest way to explain it: It’s like porn — you know it when you see it.”

On C-Diddy’s website, it’s defined as “the extent to which the performance transcends the medium and becomes a higher form of artistic expression.”

Devitt says C-Diddy had it and Japan’s Ochi “Dainoji” Yosuke, the two-time reigning World Champion, has certainly upped the ante. He’s just as skilled as the other competitors, but it's Yosuke ability to rock a crowd while wearing a sweater with a tiger on it that makes him a champion.

In fact, airness is so important, it’s one of the categories for judging. Similar to figure skating scores (with a scale of 4.0 to 6.0), air guitarists are judged on technical merit, stage presence, and airness.

There may be another factor going against U.S. competitors: politics.

“There’s still some anti-American feelings out there,” says Devitt. “The country sucks right now. And with the opinion some [Europeans] have [of the United States], I gotta imagine that it plays some part.”

But there’s still hope, in the aforementioned Ocean and Hot Lixx, and also in bright newcomers like last year’s Boston winner McNallica from Portland, Maine.

“She’s a formidable and young contestant,” says Devitt. “I think she’s really powerful and I would rate her big time this year.”

Last year McNallica joined an unsanctioned air guitar competition in Maine after the film “Air Guitar Nation” played at a local theater.

“I told my friend I was freaking down,” says McNallica. “I wanted to melt as many faces as I could in 60 seconds so I did [Motley Crue’s] ‘Kickstart My Heart.’ I brought all the moves I could and I won Portland.”

McNallica proves her rock star cred when, in the middle of a phone interview, she says to a friend, “Get my purse … and a beer.” Bring up the fact that the United States has yet to dominate the world of air guitar and she starts to sound a bit more determined and serious.

“We haven’t brought the rock since C-Diddy,” says McNallica. “It’s such a conundrum. We started rock. We have the rock! And it’s just not right … not cool. It’s gonna take a big female to do it again.”